A way late update

I’m very sorry to all of you readers of my blog. I haven’t updated it as much as I planned. . . primarily because the last few months I’ve had quite a few changes in my life. I no longer live in Korea. Instead I moved to Israel, where I’ll be now focusing full time on learning Hebrew.

Korean is still a big part of my life though. A lot of my closest friends are Korean who I communicate only in Korean with. My love for Korean hasn’t died. . . in fact I think if it’s possible it’s gotten even stronger.

Even though I’ll be focusing primarily on Hebrew for at least the next year (and probably for a couple years) I want to keep up my Korean and even improve it if possible. In the last three months since I’ve left Korea I’ve had tremendous practice in writing Korean — writing letters, chatting nonstop with friends, twittering and Facebooking in Korean — so I feel that my Korean writing has tremendously improved. The last few weeks I started writing daily entries on lang-8 — something I had tried to do before but in the past it was always rather hard to write consistently every day. For a couple different reasons it I have a lot more motive to write posts now. One of the reasons I want to continue writing is that I want to continue to practice expressing what I’m experiencing and thinking now in Korean. That way when I do meet Koreans here or go back to Korea I can talk about my life here fluently and well. I also enjoy writing in English, and I think some of that love to write and communicate is now getting funneled into my Korean diary entries. Fortunately, I’m finding it a lot easier to write posts as well. . . so that I can churn out a small post of something or other rather fast.

I also will continue to watch Korean dramas and variety shows (what can you do when you’re addicted?), listen to Korean radio shows, as well as hang out with Koreans whenever I have the chance. I want to work on pronunciation so I’m thinking right now of using TTMIK lessons. Even though the grammar in the lessons is easy, I think I can use the example sentences to practice repeating to get my intonation and stress more Korean-like.

So little by little, I hope to immerse myself in Hebrew but by putting Korean in as many parts of my life that were in English but I can’t yet switch to Hebrew (kind of like English was always (even though I tried to make it a very small) part of my life in Korea) . I hope to get somewhere. We’ll see.

It’s very cool you are studying Korean! I’ve added a link to your blog.

I’ve always wanted to learn Hebrew (ever since I was seven or so). . . but never was able to learn it with the books or websites I tried as a kid. It’s one of the oldest languages still spoken and to me it sounds really nice. So now that I can I want to try again, actually living in the country and see if I can get it.

But I really love Korean. . . when I moved to the country I moved partly to learn the language but it was mainly because it was close to Mongolian which I was interested in. But I very quickly fell in love with the language just for itself.